The profile was published just before classes started up again. I went to Easons the morning it came out and flicked through the magazine looking for my name. I stopped at a full-page photograph of Bobbi and me, taken in the garden in étables. I had no recollection of Melissa taking such a photograph. It depicted us sitting at the breakfast table together, me leaning over as if to whisper something in Bobbi’s ear, and Bobbi was laughing. It was an arresting image, the light was beautiful, and it conveyed spontaneity and warmth in a way the earlier posed photographs hadn’t. I wondered what Bobbi would say about it. The article that followed was a short, admiring account of our spoken word performances and of the spoken word scene in Dublin generally. Our friends read it and said the photograph was flattering, and Sunny sent me a nice email about it. For a while, Philip liked to carry a copy of the magazine around and read from it in a phony accent, but that joke exhausted itself eventually. Pieces like this were published in small magazines all the time, and anyway Bobbi and I hadn’t performed together in months.
Once term started, I had academic work to keep me busy again. Philip and I walked to seminars together having minor disagreements about various nineteenth-century novelists, which always ended with him saying things like: look, you’re probably right. One evening Bobbi and I called Melissa to thank her for the article. We put her on speakerphone so we could sit at the table to talk. Melissa told us all about what we’d missed in étables, the thunderstorms, and the day they went to visit the castle, things I had already heard about. We told her we had moved in together and she sounded pleased. Bobbi said: we must have you over some time. And Melissa said that would be lovely. She told us they were coming home the next day. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and rubbed absent-mindedly at a little stain on the tabletop.
I continued to read through my log of conversations with Bobbi, entering search terms which seemed wilfully calculated to annoy me. Searching for the word ‘feelings’ unearthed this conversation, from our second year of college:
Bobbi: well you don’t really talk about your feelings me: you’re committed to this view of me
me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life me: I’m just not very emotional
me: I don’t talk about it because there’s nothing to talk about Bobbi: i don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have Bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts
me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does
me: and if they’re not talking about it then they’re hiding something Bobbi: well, ok
Bobbi: we differ on that
Not all the exchanges were like this. The ‘feelings’ search also brought up the following conversation, from January:
me: I mean I always had negative feelings about authority figures me: but really only when I met you did I formulate the feelings into beliefs me: you know what I mean
Bobbi: you would have gotten there on your own though Bobbi: you have a communist intuition
me: well no, I probably only hated authority because I resent being told what to do me: if not for you I could have become a cult leader me: or an ayn rand fan
Bobbi: hey, i resent being told what to do!!
me: yes but out of spiritual purity
me: not a will to power
Bobbi: you are in many ways, the very worst psychologist
I remembered having this conversation; I remembered how effortful it felt, the sense that Bobbi was misunderstanding me, or even intentionally averting her gaze from what I was trying to say. I’d been sitting in the upstairs bedroom in my mother’s house, under the quilt, and my hands were cold. Having spent Christmas in Ballina away from Bobbi, I wanted to tell her that I missed her. That was what I had started to say, or thought about saying.
*
Nick came over to the apartment a few days after they got back, an afternoon when Bobbi was busy with lectures. When I let him in we looked at one another for a couple of seconds and it felt like drinking cold water. He was tanned, his hair was fairer than before. Oh, fuck, you look so good, I said. That made him laugh. His teeth were gorgeously white. He glanced around at the hall and said: yeah, nice apartment. It’s pretty central, what’s the rent like? I said my dad’s brother owned it and he looked at me and said: oh, you little trust fund baby. You didn’t tell me your family had property in the Liberties. The whole building or just the apartment? I punched his arm lightly and said: just the apartment. He touched my hand and then we were kissing again, and under my breath I was saying: yes, yes.